Great Ethical disasters in Internet Research?
Summer quiz!!! Chris Mann and Christian Sandvig are enlivening a rainy day here at the Oxford Internet Institute trying to remember and to list in order of notoriety examples of internet research that are generally considered to be ethically unsound.(Martin Rimm's 1995 Cyberporn study might be an example) Does anyone want to make any suggestions?? Were thinking that the Ethics Working Committee might find such a list useful when they meet up at Maastricht it might prove easier to know what to avoid than to define best practice for working ethically online! Cheers Chris and Christian
Dr. Mann, what made Rimm's Cyberporn study unethical ? I don't know that study but before judging I'd like to have some objectives, some scales linked to the objectives, tec. Dr. Frank Thomas Dr Chris Mann a écrit:
Summer quiz!!! Chris Mann and Christian Sandvig are enlivening a rainy day here at the Oxford Internet Institute trying to remember - and to list in order of notoriety -examples of internet research that are generally considered to be ethically unsound.(Martin Rimm's 1995 Cyberporn study might be an example) Does anyone want to make any suggestions?? We're thinking that the Ethics Working Committee might find such a list useful when they meet up at Maastricht - it might prove easier to know what to avoid than to define best practice for working ethically online!
Cheers Chris and Christian
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-- ---------------------------- Frank Thomas FTR Internet Research 321, boulevard de la Boissière 93110 Rosny-sous-Bois tél. 0033.1.48.94.36.90 mailto: Frank.ThomasFTR@free.fr
ooh, interesting sounding thread! like frank, i'm not sure if the study was an example of unethical research rather than methodologically flawed research. along those lines, in addition to the notorious rimm report (for a great summary of the controversy see http://www.fair.org/media-beat/950719.html) i'll add two more: 1. Carnegie Mellon's HomeNet study the study: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/copetas/www/public/pr/aug31-98.h... reaction: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-3.4/featherstone.html 2. wall street "research" in pricing dot.com's valuations. pick and choose: amazon.com, yahoo!, and my personal favorite, theglobe.com. four recent books explore this terrain in interesting ways: cassidy's dot.con, kuo's dot.bomb, ashbrook's the leap, and paternot's a very public offering. david silver On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Dr Chris Mann wrote:
Summer quiz!!!
david silver wrote:
ooh, interesting sounding thread!
like frank, i'm not sure if the study was an example of unethical research rather than methodologically flawed research. along those lines, in addition to the notorious rimm report (for a great summary of the controversy see http://www.fair.org/media-beat/950719.html) i'll add two more:
1. Carnegie Mellon's HomeNet study
the study: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/copetas/www/public/pr/aug31-98.h...
reaction: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-3.4/featherstone.html
I have read on a number of occasions attacks on the HomeNet studies for poor methodology. I am yet to read in these same messages details as to why considering the claims that were REALLY made by the researchers as to why the research was so "Flawed". The depression claim was not made as the journalists wrote. Nearly all research is flawed, the question then is relative. Perhaps David would like to explain why HomeNet is particularly flawed research. I should point out that I have NO CONNECTION to HomeNet although I very much liked many of the papers that have come out this study. For example M. Christ, R. Krishnan, D. Nagin, R. Kraut, O. Günther, Trajectories of individual WWW usage: implications for electronic commerce, Proc. 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS-34), 2001. The growing presence of the Web in everyday life is inextricably connected to the exponential growth in number and variety of Web sites offering information, commerce and services. While the number of users making use of the Internet and the Web has also grown tremendously, little is known about the extent to which individuals utilize (say, in terms of the number of visits to web sites) the Web and the trajectory of the change over time of such utilization. For example, we do not know whether the overall growth in Web usage is attributable to the increased numbers of users or to increased intensity of use of established users or both. This research is aimed to report the results of an analysis of three years of longitudinal data on residential Web usage. This data was assembled as part of the HomeNet project at Carnegie Mellon University. Drawing upon recent advances in semi-parametric, group-based statistical modeling, I examine whether there are distinctive clusters of trajectories of Web usage. I find that Web users can be clustered into four groups with distinct trajectories of use. Each of these groups achieve saturation in their extent of Web usage as measured in the number of distinct Web sites they visit over time. Demographic profiles of these different user groups will also be developed. The results are considered to have important implications for Internet marketing strategy, and public policy pertaining to the digital divide.
More about Journalists and internet research. A quote from Wired magazine "Nardi is a tall, sober-looking researcher" I do not know how many of you have come across Bonnie Nardi at CHI, CSCW, etc. but she is a little over 5 foot tall. While I have not seen her drunk, I would not describe her as "sober-looking". I had the great pleasure of working with Journalists all over the world while serving in the Israeli army. I was amazed at how well Journalists were able to organize riots to be repeated so that footage could be taken from the correct angle, at the same time serious research seems to be much harder work. Quentin
Quentin, i mentioned the HomeNet study because it seems to me that it qualifies as one of the major controversies in internet research that chris and christian are seeking. my point about the methodologically flawed aspect was less a critique of the methods (i'm hardly an expert on the quantitative analysis put forth by the authors) and more to the point that the controversy was methodologically-based rather than ethically-based. i could easily be wrong though and would like to hear more from others. david silver On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Quentin (Gad) Jones wrote:
I have read on a number of occasions attacks on the HomeNet studies for poor methodology. I am yet to read in these same messages details as to why considering the claims that were REALLY made by the researchers as to why the research was so "Flawed". The depression claim was not made as the journalists wrote. Nearly all research is flawed, the question then is relative. Perhaps David would like to explain why HomeNet is particularly flawed research.
a tangent to david and quentin's conversation below: does anyone else notice the entanglement of methods flaws and ethical flaws in the body of internet research literature they review for their research? i feel like i encounter it often in work dealing with sexuality and identity in relation to CMC. i can't be the first one to note that ethical flaws (and i'm thinking critically about attributing any intentionality here) seem to be operationalized methods flaws...any thoughts on where this discussion has already taken place? best, mary _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._ Mary L. Gray <mlgray@ucsd.edu> Department of Communication University of California, San Diego vox: 502/451.5003 mail: PO Box 4004, Louisville, KY 40204 http://weber.ucsd.edu/~mgray -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
From: david silver <dsilver@u.washington.edu> Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 12:44:17 -0700 (PDT) To: air-l@aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Great Ethical disasters in Internet Research?
Quentin,
i mentioned the HomeNet study because it seems to me that it qualifies as one of the major controversies in internet research that chris and christian are seeking. my point about the methodologically flawed aspect was less a critique of the methods (i'm hardly an expert on the quantitative analysis put forth by the authors) and more to the point that the controversy was methodologically-based rather than ethically-based. i could easily be wrong though and would like to hear more from others.
david silver
On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Quentin (Gad) Jones wrote:
I have read on a number of occasions attacks on the HomeNet studies for poor methodology. I am yet to read in these same messages details as to why considering the claims that were REALLY made by the researchers as to why the research was so "Flawed". The depression claim was not made as the journalists wrote. Nearly all research is flawed, the question then is relative. Perhaps David would like to explain why HomeNet is particularly flawed research.
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Sorry to be so late in reacting. The issue caught my interest after three weeks on a Swedish Island - Gotland. Sunny! So I may need some intellectual change! Here is my reaction to the discussion.
Thanks for putting the homenet study as a warning example! I have used it myself in a course in methodology. Useful to have flawed studies! Did you see, for example, that the web-formt of the paper does not allow you to see the figures? I had to get the original paper!
I also saw that somebody asked for the "flaws" in the study. I have seen a couple: 1) the sample of respondents is not random. This is common in psychological research, but here, the sample is probably rather biased. People did get a computer to try. How many have not already got one? Who are the people who got the computer? 2) the data are mostly based on ratings. Ratings have a tendency to get biased if they are repeated. There is something that is called "regression toward the mean". This means for instance that if you are very positive at the beginning, the average will be lower at a repeated measure, just because the average was above the (supposed) mean from the beginning. Thus, one possible bias can be the following: people were happy to get a computer. Later, they, probably got disappointed with the utility of the computer. This affects all ratings. 3) the actual "significant" differences are VERY small! You have to read the original paper. I usually do not recommend my students to talk about effects in this range at all! Good methodology and ethics go together in research, as many have proposed. We are responsible to our subjects as well as to other researchers to do as good a research as possible. Why do we else have research at all? Yvonne
1. Carnegie Mellon's HomeNet study
the study: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/copetas/www/public/pr/aug31-98.h...
reaction: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-3.4/featherstone.html
-- Yvonne Waern Professor emerita CMC-research group Computer and System Sciences Stockholm University /KTH Forum 100, S-164 40 Kista, Sweden Phone (home): +46 8 500 307 18
participants (6)
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david silver -
Dr Chris Mann -
Frank -
Mary L. Gray -
Quentin (Gad) Jones -
Yvonne Waern